It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but whenever I sit down to write a sentence like this, I need some personal conviction that what I’m saying is true—or in other words, my own frame for seeing the world. In a previous post, I talked about why a deep curiosity about the fundamentals of reality rarely aligns with popular appeal, and I wrote it through the lens of “Physics is a field that doesn’t make money.”
But one person keeps surfacing in my mind: Elon Musk. He is unimaginably wealthy, yet he studied physics in college. That single sentence—“Physics doesn’t make money”—started to feel strangely off, even to me, the one who wrote it.
Physics isn’t a person. So why did I make it sound like the ability to make money—or not—was somehow its fault?
Physics Is the Logic of the World, and It Bears No Guilt
I once briefly majored in physics at a small university in the French countryside. I didn’t finish. I had this habit of lingering on a concept until it became truly fascinating to me—but a university is a machine that never stops moving. Classes continued at their usual pace. Exams and grades kept coming. If my mind had been sharper, maybe I could have stayed ahead of that system. But I wasn’t. I was just another dropout. I didn’t yet understand what a charge really is, what an electric field truly means, or the essence of light and energy. Meanwhile, my classes had already moved on to matrix mechanics—the early form of quantum mechanics. I had transferred to physics to understand the fundamentals, but drifting through courses without grasping the core truth felt meaningless to me.
In Korea, physics is the classic “What job will that get you?” major. Turns out, it’s the same in France. My French chamber music teacher once asked, “You study physics? What will you do with that?” out of genuine concern. Physics felt like a “poor man’s field” everywhere. And yet, for Elon Musk, what did physics mean that it became the backbone of his extraordinary life?
From here on, what I’m writing isn’t an objective biography of Musk, but rather my personal lens on his life. After all, only a person truly knows their own inner world. Everyone else can only guess based on the impression their exterior leaves and the relationship they have with them. Elon Musk is no different. To himself, he is just “me.” There’s no way a stranger like me can grasp him just by Googling. Instead of that kind of hollow analysis, I’ll simply “use” Elon Musk as a mirror—to scold the part of me that has been hiding behind the excuse that my love for the fundamentals of the universe is the reason I ended up poor.
What Wealthy Parents Truly Pass On to Their Children
Whenever people talk about why Elon Musk could become so rich, they always start with his privileged upbringing. He was born into money. But I don’t believe a wealthy child becomes wealthy just because their parents hand down the cash. There are plenty of counterexamples.
What children inherit isn’t the money itself. It’s the quiet, unspoken confidence: “If I try, it will probably work.” Growing up in comfort increases the odds of inheriting that mindset. And because it’s unconscious, even the person who has it can’t really tell if it came from their environment or if they were born with it. On the flip side, the thought “It won’t work anyway” is like a demon that paralyzes you. If you assume it won’t work, you won’t act; if you don’t act, there will never be a result.
Musk’s father was anything but “ordinary.” I don’t know the full truth, but he once killed someone in self-defense, and after divorcing Elon’s mother, he had children with his second wife’s daughter. If someone is capable of making choices like that, you can imagine what their attitude might have been in every other corner of life. Biographies often portray those who achieve great success as if they were saints, but in reality, brilliant achievements often spring from an inner world that most ordinary people would struggle to comprehend. If someone produces results that no one else does, it usually means their inner world is just as unusual.
Elon Musk seems to almost loathe his father. I don’t know what he saw, or what kind of hurt he carries, but if their relationship was truly that broken, then maybe the drive to escape such a father became fuel: it hardened his sense of self, and it pushed him to act. Comfortable relationships can sometimes make you dependent; friction can light the fire.
In life, we love to give credit to the people we get along with. But sometimes, even the people we wish we could erase from our lives leave behind the sparks that make us grow. The wound just makes it hard to call it “positive.” Imagine how nauseating it would feel to Elon Musk if someone said, “Your success is thanks to your father.”
In the next post, I’ll dig into his studies, his actions, and his interviews to trace how physics actually shaped his life.